McLaren’s dominant 1988 MP4/4 has won a fan vote to discover what is the most popular Formula 1 car of all time.

During F1’s summer break, Autosport ran a ‘World Cup’ style voting competition, pitting F1 cars from throughout the world championship era against each other to determine a winner.

After progressing through the early rounds with comfortable victories, the MP4/4 faced competition from the 1992 Williams FW14B, the 1991 Jordan 191, and the 2005 McLaren MP4-20 in the final, with voting open for 24 hours and concluding on Wednesday.

The car that famously won 15 of 16 races in 1988 in the hands of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost claimed 35% of the vote, compared to 27% for the Williams and 20% for the Jordan, with the more recent McLaren finishing fourth.

How it was decided

Choices from the Autosport office and social media contributions resulted in 148 cars initially being nominated for the competition, from which the top 32 were selected and randomly drawn into eight groups of four for the opening round.

The winner of each group progressed to the penultimate stage, with the top two in each semi-final progressing to this week’s final.

While the MP4/4 won the opening semi-final, there was a tie for second place between the Williams FW14B and the Brawn BGP 001, which were then pitched head to head for an extra hour of voting to decide the second finalist – with the 1993 Williams FW15C a distant fourth.

The McLaren MP4-20 and the Jordan progressed relatively comfortably from the second semi-final, defeating the 1990 and 1995 Ferraris.

In total, nearly 30,000 votes were cast by fans throughout the competition.